Data Center Search Engine is Launched

San Francisco, California – (via THE HOSTING NEWS) – August 8, 2005 – Splunk, a new start-up, has announced the first search engine designed specifically for systems administrators to troubleshoot their data centers. The Splunk Personal Server is available for free public beta download at: http://www.splunk.com.

Dan Kusnetzky, Vice President, System Software, IDC explains the service, ”Data center managers are under increasing organizational pressures to improve performance, reliability and scalability in their IT operating environments at the cost, however, of increased complexity. Tools like the Splunk Server that promise to deal with operational complexity will be a benefit.”

The Splunk Server has been field tested in a private beta program by 25 companies across a range of industries including financial services, pharmaceuticals, online services, telecommunications and customer call centers. Today, Splunk starts a public beta program for anyone to participate.

Customers benefit with increased uptime and a significant reduction in the cost of data center operations. Users are able to speed the analysis of problems and identification of root causes. For the first time, teams can share troubleshooting context across the data center or around the world.

Michael Baum, Chief Executive Splunker and former Vice President of E-commerce Services at Yahoo added, ”People thought web search was complex, but that’s about indexing and searching fairly static data in a single language like English, German or Chinese. Machine data is very dynamic and takes the form of many languages like web servers, databases and networking devices that all need to be indexed and searched at the same time. We’ve invented powerful algorithms that dynamically index and discover relationships across diverse domains of machine data on the fly.”

Splunk enables systems administrators, support staff and developers to diagnose and resolve problems faster and more precisely by reverse engineering system and application logic and following the trail of any transaction. The Splunk Server organizes and makes sense of all types of machine-generated data, including Web servers, application servers, email servers, databases and network devices. Its utility and ease of use make Splunk applicable to a wide range of situations including distributed enterprise applications, on-demand services, messaging, customer support and IP telephony and VoIP.

Brian Aker, Director of Architecture at MySQL commented, ”System administrators can easily manage data about the physical health of their systems. But what about the data regarding the logical health of systems? Today, it’s scattered about in many anguages and locations. Now imagine having all that data aggregated and searchable, not as separate outputs from your application stacks, but from a single unified interface where you can find related issues.”

The Splunk Server installs quickly and can be up and running in under 15 minutes. Users access the Splunk Server’s AJAX interface through a Web browser. Once data is indexed, users can find their way through systems using time and keyword searches or navigate the links of event relationships by pointing and clicking through Splunk’s interactive results. . ”The Splunk Server software installed in a snap and within minutes I was searching through our logs,” said Scott Nelson Windels, director of Operations at InfoCentricity, a provider of software and analytical services. ”For any IT or Operations team who needs to quickly sift through a variety of logs and log formats to identify and resolve issues, the concept of Splunking is both exciting and refreshing!”